"If you look like a sack of offal that's been drop-kicked down a lift shaft into a pond, you're going to spend most of your formative years alone," writes phenomenally successful comedian Miranda Hart in an extract from her new book. She begs the question whether being a self-described "Ugly One" makes you more ambitious and likely to work harder. Hart believes that this "alone time", the result of her "plainness", freed up time and energy to develop her comedy skills, while the more beautiful (and therefore popular) girls were busy snogging and preparing for what Hart would have you believe are now lives of crushing unhappiness and unrelenting monotony.

The constraints on young girls and the pressures that they feel with regards to their appearance can be all-consuming, and Hart is correct that "opting out" can bring about a kind of liberation. The psychological segregation between the "haves" and the "have-nots" of conventional attractiveness can cause a lifetime of insecurity, and it's true that being perceived as beautiful (or wanting to be) can come with its own constraints and limits; limits that Hart claims to have escaped, perhaps by utilising what she believes as shortcomings in her appearance as comic inspiration (but is she ugly? I think not).

On the other side of the coin is Daily Mail queen troll "don't hate me 'cos I'm beautiful" Samantha Brick, who represents the assumption that other women hate the more physically gifted just for being fit. Hart is doing little to dispel that myth. Deciding not to worry about your appearance can result in a kind of liberation, certainly, but attending a school reunion, as Hart does, and gloating at the lack of success of those who do renders the liberation somewhat hollow. The Ugly Ones "won a thousand times over" reckons Hart, although "the Ugly Ones" seem to be devoting too significant a chunk of their time to schadenfreude to be hailed as true winners. Many conventionally attractive women have few expectations placed upon them: in this we are not so far from Austen. At my school (somewhat more down at heel than Hart's) the solution was to get pregnant. Would rejoicing in that really be "winning"?

Indeed, both sets of women look like losers for buying into this ridiculous false dichotomy. The idea that you cannot be both attractive and intelligent or successful persists despite all evidence to the contrary. We know this to be false, because many women are just that. ("The bitches. How dare they?") Then there's the snobbish notion that spending time on your appearance somehow makes you just that little bit stupider than those people who ponce around quoting Goethe in a flurry of plaque and dandruff, not caring that being in their vicinity makes everyone else want to gouge out their own retinas with an eyelash curler. Can't we have both? What's wrong with having brushed hair, clean knickers, a great sex life and an exceptional grasp of mental arithmetic?

Referring to another woman as a sack of offal would be a wounding cruelty – so why do it to yourself? We do not need to self-deprecate or lay bare our insecurities to endear ourselves to one another, and yet women do just that, all the time. I was even going to put a gag about the size of my arse in this paragraph, and had to stop myself. That we are all in competition looks-wise is not as solid a belief as we might think. Society's unrealistic beauty ideals have not penetrated to the extent that we have forgotten that everyone values different qualities when it comes to what we find attractive (though a happy smile, and not an insecure frown, is universally prized).

Ultimately (as a wise mum once said), no one cares as much about your appearance as you do, so why go on about it? That fatal glaring flaw you hate can be like catnip to someone else. Which is why the fact so many women waste their time talking about it makes me sad. Donald Trump does not attribute his success to having shit hair, and men are not devoting the same column inches to this topic. I'm probably colluding in my own oppression by adding to this slurry heap of articles. Something to ponder while I'm painting my nails.